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The Colibrí Center for Human Rights is excited to invite applications for four contracted, part-time positions with our Family Network program. Please review the job description and requirements below. The deadline to apply is August 3, 2018.

Overview

The Colibrí Center for Human Rights is a family advocacy nonprofit working to end migrant death and related suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border. We partner with families, forensic scientists, and humanitarians to find the missing and help identify the dead. We also work to bear witness to the loss of life and hold space for families to build community, share their stories, and help raise consciousness about this human rights crisis.

The Family Network is a program of the Colibrí Center that cultivates a community of mutual support and solidarity between families and friends of disappeared migrants. The Network consists of local groups (comités) in cities across the United States, digital spaces of connection, and a referral network of trusted specialists who can provide individual attention to families’ specific mental health and legal needs.

The Family Network Accompaniers will assist in strengthening this community by providing psychosocial accompaniment to families and facilitating referrals to trusted service providers. They will organize and co-facilitate bimonthly comité meetings and build accountable and empathetic relationships with individual Family Network participants to help them develop their capacities for resilience and overcome the multiple forms of disenfranchisement that they face.

*Note: this position is cross-listed in four different cities: Tucson, AZ; Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco, CA. The Colibrí Center is looking to hire one Family Network Accompanier in each city for a total of four positions.

Responsibilities

Comité Meetings

With Colibrí staff, design and facilitate bimonthly comité meetings, focusing on themes that families identify as priorities with an emphasis on activities that build emotional resilience and healing among the participants

Coordinate logistics for comité meetings, working with family leaders to find a space, arrange for refreshments, and invite families to attend, among other tasks

Maintain contact with and schedule childcare and support volunteers to provide assistance during comité meetings

Referral Network

With Colibrí staff, assist in development of local referral network and maintain relationships with service providers

Coordinate referrals to trusted local organizations and service providers per families’ individual needs

Report back to and advise Colibrí on progress and outcomes of family referrals

Communications with Colibrí

Track and report on comité meetings and local Family Network members’ needs, writing debriefs after each meeting

Participate in regular check-ins with Tucson-based staff

Participate in occasional conference calls with Family Network Accompaniers in other cities

Qualifications

At least two years of experience working with immigrant or refugee communities, diverse audiences/trainees, and/or individuals navigating emotional trauma and ambiguous loss

Fully bilingual in both written and spoken English and Spanish

Graduate or professional degree in psychology, counseling, or social work (MA, MSW) preferred but not required

Commitment to social justice, (im)migrant rights, and empowering families to be protagonists of their own wellbeing

Strong interpersonal skills and ability to connect with diverse groups of people while also staying attuned to individual participants’ emotional states

This is a contracted position for one year. Hours and workdays per month vary according to families’ schedules and needs, ranging from 5 to 15 hours per month. Competitive hourly rate commensurate with experience.

Disclaimer: This job is performed under general office conditions, and is not subject to any strenuous physical demands or dangerous conditions.

The Colibrí Center for Human Rights is an equal opportunity employer and strongly encourages applications from people of color, persons with disabilities, women, and LGBTQIA+ applicants. Individuals with lived experience of immigration are also strongly encouraged to apply.

April 23, 2018 — The jury in the murder trial of Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz has just returned with a not guilty verdict on the second-degree murder charge. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the two lesser charges brought against Swartz. News reports and community mobilization are still developing in the wake of this decision.

Swartz was on trial for the murder of 16-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was killed by Swartz on October 10, 2012. On this night, Swartz targeted José Antonio, firing 16 bullets in 34 seconds from three different positions. He shot through the border fence in Nogales, Arizona, striking José Antonio ten times — eight times in the back and twice in the head. Forensic analysis found that Jose Antonio was already on the ground when Swartz continued to fire his gun. During the trial, the prosecution said the fact that Swartz continued to fire his weapon even after José Antonio was on the ground demonstrates the agent acted deliberately and with reckless disregard for human life.

Like everyone else in this community and, indeed, around the world, Colibrí is still reeling from this decision by the jury. In the meantime, we wish to express our outrage at the not guilty verdict as well as our support for the Elena Rodriguez family in this immensely painful moment. José Antonio’s family, friends, and community have spent the past six years carrying out tremendous acts of remembrance and love. They have beautifully kept his memory alive and courageously called for justice in his murder. This is a shameful day for the Tucson community and for everyone who believes in the justice system to actually deliver justice.

Today’s verdict is a clear and heartbreaking demonstration of the violent policing of the border and the lack of accountability in these all too frequent instances of deadly force. Indeed, this is a trend that exists in policing throughout the U.S. and around the world. Today, we renew our call for increased oversight, transparency, and, most of all, accountability within Border Patrol, an agency that has thousands of agents policing border communities that extend hundreds of miles past the actual border line. We echo our fellow community members in saying that the over-policing of border communities must end.

Along with our community, Colibrí demands justice for José Antonio Elena Rodriguez and justice for his family and all those who continue to suffer his loss.

His name was Mario. He sat on a stool under fluorescent lights, his feet just short of reaching the stage below. A deep sigh, a pause: this was still new for him, being watched. His eyes cast outward to the group assembled in front of him. Mustering strength, he whispered, “I’ve come to believe that to live in Latin America is to experience disappearance.”

Six months earlier, Mario’s son César had gone missing, one of 43 student-teachers who were forcibly disappeared after protests in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. There was no explanation, no support for the families, so Mario and three other relatives of the missing organized a solidarity caravan through South America in the hopes of pressuring the Mexican government to ensure that justice was met and their children found. He worried that he would never be able to return to Mexico, but his love for his son compelled him to journey onwards. If the price of finding his son was never returning home, he said, then so be it.

His words, shared at a gathering at the University of Buenos Aires in 2015, shook me to the core. They also resonated deeply with an Argentine audience, almost all of whom were students César’s age. They had grown up with stories of the 30,000 desaparecidos, people sequestered and killed during Argentina’s military dictatorship, one of a constellation of violent regimes across Latin America in the twentieth century. Like Mario’s, their lives were also marked by other lives taken prematurely and unjustly. “Nosotros, como ustedes,” Mario shared, “tenemos desaparecidos.”

Today we face another crisis of disappearance along the border between the United States and Mexico. It’s distinct, one characterized in part by direct violence within one country and in part by dangers that span two or more. But the pain of a missing loved one connects today’s struggle to those of generations past. Colibri’s database contains records for over 2,500 missing migrants last seen crossing the border: brothers, sisters, friends, coworkers, classmates, parents, grandchildren, neighbors. These are people who loved and who are loved in return, whose lives are still intricately woven into the fabric of their home communities and whose absence leaves a void made emptier still by the burden of the unknown.

This month, we at Colibrí are reflecting on the idea that migration is an act of love. And just as love compels people to cross borders, so too does it motivate others to search for answers when those people go missing. As the Family Network Coordinator at Colibrí, I speak almost every day with heartbroken families searching for relatives and friends, families whose resilience — despite the most formidable odds and the direst circumstances — never ceases to humble me. A cousin who’s contacted every conceivable agency in the hopes that someone might know something about their beloved Julio. An undocumented woman from El Salvador living in the United States, who risked deportation and traveled to Texas to look for her son along the Rio Grande. A sister who, between silences, wishes she’d never let her brother leave their hometown in central Mexico: “All he wanted was to make us happy, to build us a house to live in. And now he’s gone.”

Our work every day at Colibrí is to correct that disappearance — if not with reappearance, then with answers and with sanctuary. In the long run, we hope to create a new narrative of migration and a new reality for border policy, bounded by love and the recognition of each person’s humanity.

Immigration policies fueled by hate and exclusion cause suffering, disappearance, and death. It’s time for this to end; it’s time that disappearance disappeared from the Americas. And it’s time that love — the same love that lights up a mother’s eyes when she remembers her son — filled in its place.

This holiday season, we hope you’ll join us in building sanctuary and compassion along the border.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde, 1988

I consider myself the daughter of immigrants.

My mother: the fruit of immigration by generations past, but who keeps the same beautiful brown skin, name, language and traditions that, in the United States, often define her as “other”, sometimes mistake her as “Mexican”, and always gift her the name “Mexican-American”.

This is the part of my identity I call on the most, especially in my work with families searching for missing loved ones on the border. I use the language, mannerisms, and norms of my cultural heritage. But it is only half of my immigrant past.

My father came to the United States when he was only 19-years-old. Growing up in the middle of a large family in a small town in Lebanon, he will recount stories to you of studying for exams by candlelight when the national electricity outages would roll through, stories of embodying the hopes and dreams of his working class family, stories of violent civil war and of poverty, stories of the wrong turns he almost took and, despite his own hard work and the hard work of his father — my jiddo — the pure blessing of chance that gave him the opportunity few others had to emigrate to study at university in the United States.

Often times, I feel like my father’s story is so very distant from the work I do in immigration activism. In many ways, it is. Though his journey was not easy, it was distinct from that of thousands of people who clandestinely cross borders.

Among the threads that connect them, however, is the beautiful courage to believe so fiercely and foolishly in oneself and in the deep love one has for others that you leave everything you know in search of a future that is by no means guaranteed and will undoubtedly require continued, often excruciating sacrifice.

To fight for oneself requires a special kind of tenacity that is not as frequently glorified as the kind of tenacity inherent in self sacrifice. Particularly, when it comes to migration.

It is true: the choice to migrate is very rarely an individual-level decision, nor is it made with only oneself in mind. My father dared to imagine he could succeed in a country that spoke an unfamiliar language, practiced unfamiliar customs, and was located more than 7,000 miles away from his home. Without having any empirical reason to do so, he believed in himself.

However, to this day, he will tell you the reason he chose to leave was to create a future that would enable him to provide for his family back home — his parents, sister, brothers, nieces and nephews. Like thousands of others, he had painful conversations with his family where they chose to separate from one another in the hope that something better was possible. Like so many other migrants, he left with his heart full of the love he had for others and that others had for him.

The family-centered stories are important, truthful, and beautiful. Yet, it is the love migrants have for themselves that I find crucial to talk about in today’s world, one where migrants are dehumanized, criminalized, and homogenized to be either victims or villains.

In a global community where every dominant narrative tells the migrant that they are dispensable, unimportant, or simple, believing in oneself and loving oneself enough to act on that belief is a radical act of resistance.

When we chose to focus on the phrase migrar es amar — to migrate is to love — we had in mind both the love of family and the love of self because we recognize the beauty, fierceness, and resistance inherent in them both. To respect and honor migration is to see all parts of this story.

I would like to pose a challenge to everyone reading this letter: think about the most precious people in your life. Think about your parents, your partners, your siblings, your children. Think about your friends and neighbors.

Who are those people whose loss would most devastate you?

What would you do to protect them?

If crossing a border meant saving your child’s life or having the ability to buy medicine your mother desperately needed, would you do it? Over and over again people in desperate situations have proven to us that when it comes to their family, to those they hold most dear, there is no wall high enough to stop them from seeking a better future. What is this if not love in action?

Throughout the 1980’s, Latin America was plagued by civil wars and genocide. As people fled the violence, churches throughout the United States opened their doors to provide respite and shelter. This effort became known as the Sanctuary Movement, and many of the leaders of these churches believed in the idea of radical hospitality. The concept of radical hospitality is an extension of welcome that exceeds expectations and envelopes people in kindness and support. For the nuns and priests and parishioners practicing radical hospitality, their religious calling was fulfilled through political action. They were living their truths in the most concrete and authentic of ways, by caring for their neighbors and doing what was right to do, not what was easy.

Although we started Colibrí years after the Sanctuary Movement, our ideological roots trace back to that idea of radical hospitality. We will never turn anyone away from our services if we are able to help them. While we don’t offer a space of physical respite, our work to help identify the dead and accompany the families throughout that process is something we have built sanctuary around. We offer a road to answers and justice, a road safe for everyone.

For me personally, radical hospitality is a concept that has expanded throughout the years I have been involved in this work. It has crept into my life in unexpected and meaningful ways, and it has challenged me to do better and work harder. The best teachers throughout this time have been the families we work alongside. Interacting with those who have lost a loved one on the border has been a humbling experience that has exposed me to the very best the human spirit has to offer. I have listened to a young man describe his missing mother’s teeth with incredible accuracy, all from memory, his voice quavering with grief. I have watched as families arrive to DNA appointments with folders full of documents, meticulously organized, all pertaining to their search. I have seen people in the depths of despair extend generous compassion to others despite their own pain. This work has given me opportunities to stand witness to incredible courage, tenacity, and of course, love. At Colibrí we see that love every single day.

I feel deeply honored to be a part of this effort. In the spirit of the Sanctuary Movement, I hope that our community of supporters feels the call of radical hospitality, and what it teaches us about compassion and fellowship. We don’t need to wait a moment longer to dig in and do work that is valuable, authentic, and kind. Please join us as we work towards a future where human rights are protected, families are respected, and migration is safe.

Personally, the decision to migrate to the United States has been one of the most difficult decisions of my life. On the one hand, there existed the opportunity to do it in a relatively easy way and the possibility of new opportunities that would have meant a radical change in my life and the lives of those I love, above all, the life of Santiago, my son. On the other hand, was the difficult, almost impossible decision to have to separate myself from my baby without knowing when I would be able to see him again; how many days, months, or even years were going to pass without being able to hug him. Just the thought that I would not be able to tuck him in when he went to sleep, that I would not be able to take care of him when he was sick…it meant and still means a lump in my throat and a profound pain.

A big part was the frustration over the lack or little possibility of a decent job in which I was respected as a woman and as a professional, a lack almost reaching the conformism of terrible working conditions which the majority of people are subjected to. In the end, it was the fear of the uncontrollable violence in Guatemala, violence of which I was victim on several occasions and of which I was also a witness, witnessing the vile murder of a 13-year-old boy and realizing that Santiago could be that innocent child, murdered in the street when he left school simply because he did not want to belong to the gang. I realized that I had to find a better place, a place where my son would not grow up with the fear to which we are all prisoners in my country, a country where we leave the house without knowing if we will return or if we will end up becoming part of the daily statistics.

Despite my own desire to fight in my beautiful country, I had to face that day when I said goodbye to my son, my mother, my siblings and nieces. Six months passed without being able to see my Santiago. I missed the piñata at his 4th birthday party, his first day of school and many other moments that I will never be able to get back in our lives, but there is also the great satisfaction of knowing that I am working with all my strength so that one day soon, we are together forever.

As a professional, a woman, a mother and a migrant, it is an honor to work at the Colibrí Center with the families of missing persons. Talking to families every day teaches me a lesson in love and sacrifice, which each of these people made when making this difficult decision.

As a team and as individuals, we are witnessing that migration is one of the greatest acts of love that a human being can perform for their loved ones. Each story is unique and teaches us a lesson in life. Their stories help us to understand that this person was a father / mother, son / daughter, brother / sister, husband / someone who is missed and has left a vacuum that no one else can ever fill. It is a story of struggle, sacrifice, hope, but above all of LOVE.

My name is Arturo Magaña. I recently joined the Colibrí Center for Human Rights as the Missing Migrant Project Associate. I spend work days speaking with people who lost someone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

When I arrive in the morning to work, I plug in my laptop and go through the inquiries we received the evening before. I take down messages from people in El Salvador, Honduras, México, Guatemala, the United States, and elsewhere. These people have lost brothers, mothers, fathers, in the Sonoran Desert.

This day, a woman tells me her story. Her son, Francisco, is missing. The last time they spoke, he called her from Nogales, Sonora, just south of the border. She is from Jalisco, México. She tells me, “My son’s birthday is June 18, 1998. He has light brown skin. He is left handed. He likes to tell jokes. When he walks down the sidewalk, he doesn’t stand up straight. You can tell it’s him by the way he walks. He snaps his fingers. He’s always moving. Nunca está quieto. He likes to stand in front of the hallway mirror and watch himself practice his soccer.”

As I hang up the phone, I think to myself, this woman’s son is from the same streets my grandparents were from.

I record Francisco’s details in our database. As the day goes on, I listen to other stories. Other families. Lost people. People’s worries. But the woman from Jalisco sticks in my mind. She told me, “I remember the way my Panchito would buy me little gifts when I knew he had no money.”

—

I take my lunch and sit down, thinking about things in life behind and before me.

I think about the change in my pockets. My wallet: a few bucks and a prayer card my grandmother gave me. I feel the weight of the woman’s words on my shoulders. Sweat gathers on my brow and under my arms.

An old fisherman once told me that the stench of history hangs about all of us. I sit there thinking, perhaps, there are cycles in history. But, you know, there are always the same human wants and needs. Human needs remain the same throughout all history. People need to eat. A person must find love and that love must fulfill them. People need a roof over their heads to cover them from the wind and the rains. Mothers and fathers need to provide a future for their children. People must carry in their chests some sort of hope. Hope of a better reality. Hope of a better job, one that makes a person proud to stand in front of their family. People need to lie in their beds at night and sleep deep sleep, undaunted by the uncertainty that awaits their children tomorrow.

The truth is, I know so very little, but one of the things I do know is that people need to move to different places to get ahead in life. I think about students moving to university. Or parents moving to a neighborhood where there are better schools. The campesinos move with the harvest seasons of Arizona and California. I believe that to migrate is an act of love, because people always migrate with the worries and hopes of others in mind. People migrate to help others, and helping others comes from love.

The other day someone asked me, why I do the work I do? This is a difficult question for me to answer. I think one reason is because my parents gave me an example, an idea of life to work towards. I think I have been brought to this work, because my family has always been a working-class family. My grandfather fished in the Sea of Cortez. My grandmother worked in a vegetable packing plant. My father and uncles worked in the fields.

I see my family in the people I work with. I hear the same voices, and I want to do something for them, because it is just simple rightness.

As we come to the end of a difficult year when we have seen unprecedented attacks on immigrants and their families, we are compelled to reflect on our work at Colibrí, and share with you what inspires us to continue. Every day, we speak with the relatives of those who have died or disappeared along the U.S.-Mexico border, and we collaborate with forensic scientists trying to connect the dots between the dead and the missing. Every day in these interactions, we witness profound acts of love, care, and compassion.

I have been committed to the work of identifying the unknown dead and supporting the families of the missing since 2006. Over the years, I have frequently been asked the question, “how can you do this work?” Sometimes it is asked with genuine concern and empathy, and sometimes it is asked with more than a hint of disgust—why would you choose to work in a medical examiner’s office and focus on something so macabre?

I choose this work not because it has to do with death, but because it has to do with love. I often look through the items migrants were carrying when they died. Although clues to their identity are often difficult to find, it is easy to find clues that these journeys across the border are acts of love. In their wallets are photos of their children. In their pants pockets are letters from their husbands and wives. In their backpacks are bibles, prayer cards, and rosaries.

Sometimes there are clues that other migrants had shown care and love to the dead or dying, even while facing their own risk of death or deportation in the desert. Once, after helping to identify a man named Carmen, I asked his brother if Carmen had been carrying several rosaries. His brother said no, it wouldn’t have been Carmen’s habit to carry that many rosaries. They were likely placed on Carmen’s body by migrants who passed him on their journey.

In other cases, the dead have been found with handmade stretchers built by migrants who had tried to carry the dead or injured to safety. Migrants offer a model of how to show care and compassion in extremely difficult conditions. So do the forensic scientists I have had the privilege of working with over the years. Despite being overwhelmed with an enormous caseload, forensic anthropologists carefully attend to each and every bone on their examining table. They not only chart the presence or absence of every tooth, but also the condition of each of the five surfaces of every tooth. Human rights scholar Adam Rosenblatt has written that “forensic care is involved in the creation of more caregivers” (2015: 181). By identifying the dead, forensic scientists can connect unknown remains back to a family and community that can properly care for them.

At the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, we see it as our duty to not only help identify each and every individual unknown person so that they can be returned to those who know and love them, but also to expand the community of care and love around those we have collectively lost on the U.S.-Mexico border. They were loved, they were cherished, and they are irreplaceable. They were beautiful, they were challenging, they were funny, they existed. They mattered.

This holiday season, we invite you to join our community of care around migrants and their families. Their deaths were untimely and unnecessary, but their lives were meaningful. Their families remember them with joy, and with love. Please support our work with a donation, and call your community in as well. Together, we can claim those who have died and disappeared as ours, and reject the hate and fear that has led to their deaths.